Look at the Pretty Flower
by Sentimental Semantics
Summary: "I took a bad hit to the head." One-shot, drabble; ambiguous in regards to genre. Rated M.


I was running when the grenade hit the ground, but I didn't see it land—so I kept running. I was either moving away or into an explosion; it was just an instinctive reaction. Somehow, it seems like 'luck' should never be important in a life-or-death situation, but inevitably it is.

I didn't really hear the explosion, so much as I felt it. And I didn't feel it in the normal sense; 'to feel' implies 'to touch'. I didn't even realize what was happening until after I had landed—which was when my ears stopped ringing. It all seemed to happen very quickly and very abruptly. I'd been running, trying to reach a bit of cover farther up the field, staying low as I ran—as low as I could, to avoid getting shot. One second I was running, and the next the ground seemed to disappear from beneath my feet, and I flew through the air, not exactly sure of what had occurred. For a second it simply felt like I was flying, but then I saw the sky whiz by my obscured (perhaps muffled would be more fitting?) vision and felt a pain in my back. Then I was not flying anymore, and one by one my senses returned, starting with touch—I felt pain along my spine that was a combination of both jarring and numbing.

I can't really see. I never liked these helmets. They are nice in that you can't smell anything when you're wearing them, but your peripheral vision is cut, and everything sounds a bit farther away—wearing one makes you feel a bit more detached, somehow. It has its pros and cons, but right now I don't want to be wearing the helmet. I think the visor has cracked, and when I landed the back of my head slammed against the back of my helmet—which must have slammed into the same thing my back slammed into—and it hurts. Unlike my back, which feels inoperable and dead, my skull stings, and its beginning to feel pretty hot. Not really sure of my surroundings, I reach up and take the helmet off—again, out of instinct.

It hits the ground beneath me with a thud, and I see a red stain on its interior as I move it past my eyes. It feels like my skull cracked open, and if there's blood on the inside of my helmet, that could very well be a possibility. I have a sudden urge to reach up and touch where the pain is coming from, like an infant would, but I'm stopped by the weight of my arms—they feel very heavy, already exhausted from taking my helmet off.

I try to move my neck to at least see most of my surroundings—as all I can see at the moment is the sky (which is overcast, and full of smoke, making it quite unappealing)—but I quickly realize my neck hurts, too. A _lot_. Its movable, but its movable in a grudging sort of way. I must have had a very violent landing.

I feel the heat at the back of my head gradually numbing, but I can also feel blood trickling down my face. A single line of it dribbles down the left side of my face, and I can feel the warmth of it against my skin as it moves. It slides over my left eyebrow and then a bit drips down towards my eye, catching on the lower lid, which I flutter in an attempt to make sure the blood doesn't get in my eyes. Thankfully it doesn't; it keeps moving south, out of my eyelid before catching on the curve of my cheekbone and pauses momentarily on my lip. I feel it there, but my lips are clamped shut; I don't like how blood tastes. Eventually, after wavering on the very top, it continues, rolling over the curve of both my top and bottom lip and continuing down towards my chin. I stop paying it attention, trying to refocus.

As everything in my body seems either unresponsive or in pain, I start with the small things first, and try and move up from there. To my approval, I find that I can still move my fingers, and can still make my hands into fists—even though it feels a little odd. I am able to move my arms, but they feel sort of floppy and lethargic.

When I eventually gain the courage to move my neck a bit more, I see enough to get a general glimpse of what happened—though I don't know how much time has elapsed _since _it happened, as my ears are still ringing and I can't hear anything. Maybe my eardrums popped; I'm not entirely sure.

I'm a distance away from the crater. It's a big one, too—it looks like I made the right choice when I kept running; if I had stopped I probably would have died right there and then. The crater cuts a gouging scar in the concrete and pavement, a large mark in the sea of asphalt and scattered debris—although I can see other scars here and there of ranging sizes to complement this one. The grenade threw a lot of scattered belongings into the sky; I can see, among other things, a newspaper, a hubcap, and a leg.

I'm facing the crater—which I was running from—so the explosion must have flipped me around in the air. I realize then, and only then, that I was unceremoniously (but usefully) hurled into the spot of cover to which I had been running; the explosion propelled my towards it, and it must have been what my back slammed into. Even with all my heavy armor on my back still hurts dreadfully; I'm surprised I didn't just go straight through the barricade.

It occurs to me that I'm not holding my rifle. That's obvious, as I needed both hands to take my helmet off, but it didn't really seem important before—and in a way it still doesn't, but at least now I notice its missing. I look around for it—

_This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine…_

—And eventually I spot the very top of it peeking out from the edge of the grenade crater. I see the barrel poking upwards at the gray sky, and I can see the points of the chainsaw-bayonet, too. Most of the back of it I can't see, as it is on the edge of the crater. It sits there, half obscured, half present, looking like a metallic, chrome tombstone set against a sea of concrete.

As I look at it I realize that it is too far away for me to get it—and I'm certainly not moving. I probe at my muscles, trying to see if I can push myself closer against my cover, but they don't respond. It doesn't matter; the important thing is that I made it to cover, safe. My Lancer might be out of reach, but I still have my sidearm.

But as I stare at the visible part of my gun, I notice something strange. In front of the rifle—

_My rifle is my best friend. It is my life…_

—in between me and the crater—there is a single bit of life, rising from a crack in the pavement.

A flower is growing there. It's very pretty. It hasn't been growing for very long—its only about five inches tall—but its already blooming. Its petals are an eggshell white, contrasting its green stem and a bit of a yellowy coloration at the very center of the petals. Its brittle little stem is waving a tiny bit in what must be a slight breeze—although I don't really feel it, if its there.

I can't imagine why, or how, this flower got here. It is tiny, minuscule—a bit of organic among a world of artificial. If my rifle—

_I must master it as I must master my life…_

—is the tombstone, then this flower is right above the coffin. It's a sort of grim pastoral—not praising earthly nature, but human nature instead.

My mind is wandering. I'm in the middle of a gunfight, and I'm thinking about flowers—stupid. I can't even be sure that flower is there; I could be hallucinating. After all, I took a bad hit to the head.

But I did my job. The Sergeant ordered me to move up, and I did. And I'm here. Pretty soon the rest of the platoon should be following, now that they can see that its safe.

My ears are still ringing so I can't hear anything—which is kind of nice, because gunfire and screaming and explosions make it a lot harder to focus. My vision is still a little groggy, but over in the distance—where I came from—I can make out the figures of the other soldiers. I can see someone—I'm not sure who, but I think it is someone I know—manning a machine gun. Its being fired into the distance, past where I am, at something I can't see. But still, I can't see much.

I know I need to focus—now more than ever—but my thoughts keep dragging back to the flower. Its very improbable that it could grow out here…

As I'm sitting there, trying to collect my thoughts, I feel another explosion—to my right, at a distance I can't exactly gauge. I see pieces of concrete go flying up into the air, and they land around me—a bit of debris lands in my lap, and I see another couple of pieces tumble into the crater that I barely avoided. I'm glad to see none of the debris lands on the flower. Its still there, bouncing slightly in the wind.

The explosion bumps me around a bit, and any progress my ears were making towards normalcy definitely becomes negated in the fury of the blast. I raise a hand wearily, trying to make myself noticeable to the men near the machine gun, as they must be waiting to run to my position, and will want to know that it's alright.

They don't see me. It's frustrating. I feel my thoughts departing again, but I continue to discipline myself. Maybe I can get my sidearm out and fire it into the air, so that they see? That might be good, but the enemy might see as well, and might get here first.

I need to get up, so they can see me moving around. I push myself up, moving my legs to brace me so I can get off of the ground. …But nothing happens.

I try this several more times before finally realizing that my legs are gone.

I realize this in a way that isn't panicked, but is just sort of stunned. After the third try I got frustrated and, gritting my teeth, craned my neck farther down to look at my lower body—which only then I realize isn't there. The frustration doesn't last long, and I sort of just sit there staring at the stumps on either side of my pelvis, a little perturbed. It doesn't connect at first that I'm looking at myself, but somewhere, in some small corner of my mind, I feel panic beginning to bubble up. I still can't quite grasp the fact that I am not able to move—and what that means—and I am a bit surprised that my legs don't hurt more than they do. I suppose it has something to do with the muscle having been cut in half. I look up, away from my lower body, and at my surroundings.

So that leg over there must be mine. I'm not sure where the other one is.

Upon making that particular connection, the panic explodes outward and overwhelms me. I realize I'm screaming (but I can't hear it—my ears are still ringing) despite not hearing any pain. I don't know how loudly I'm screaming and I can't really stop myself—I feel like I'm hyperventilating. I look up at the machine gun, hoping maybe my screams will get someone's attention.

They don't.

After a little while I feel myself calming down. My breath is slightly less ragged. But now I'm really hurting; the stubs sticking a bit out of my pelvis are starting to throb—understandably. Maybe that's because now that I _realize _what's happened, I _realize _the pain? I'm not sure. Anyway, it hurts.

My head hurts now too. I feel my vision getting blurry, but I concentrate. I hurt all over but I'm not dead.

Part of my brain is still screaming, still panicking. Another part is trying to be soothing and supportive. I feel like the madman and the medic and the cripple and the psychiatrist all at the same time. Everything still hurts.

I wince, and I close my eyes, trying to take deep breaths and ignore the pain. When I open my eyes I'm not entirely surprised to see that I'm looking at the flower again.

I'm definitely hallucinating. There's no way a flower could grow in a place like this. What I'm looking at certainly cannot be there.

But if that's true, how do I know that I'm even alive anymore? Maybe I am just dead and hallucinating…once I read a short story about a man who hallucinated about his survival during his execution. Maybe that's what's happening to me? Or something else could be happening. Maybe I'm in hell and this pain is punishment, or maybe the afterlife doesn't know what to do with me yet, so I'm sitting here with this hallucination in my head, like some sort of diversionary purgatory.

…All I do know is, whether its real or not, that flower is very beautiful.

I can't distinguish much. The concrete of the ground is gray. The cloudy, smoking sky is gray. Somewhere off in the distance, at the horizon, they merge. I can't pick the exact spot. All the shades are mixing together.

The flower is still moving a bit in the breeze.

The part of my brain that wants to stay focused and stay disciplined is now in the minority—the panicking side is taking over. I'm going to die. I'm going to die because I can't move. I'm going to lie here and bleed out of my skull, and nobody is going to come get me, because they don't know I'm still alive. Or because I have been forgotten

Maybe running out of that grenade explosion was the wrong decision.

Panic and reason do not mix well. I know I need to try and get out of this predicament, but I can't think of how, and the pain makes it hard to think at all.

Its really becoming unbearable now. I can't stand the pain anymore.

The Sergeant told me to move up on this position, and now I'm here. I did my job. I've done what I was supposed to do.

I have no reason to keep lying here, now that my job is done.

My arms still feel heavy, but I can move them. The blood on the left side of my face is now a bit thicker, and now I can feel some of it dripping into my eye. Still, I clamp my mouth shut, because I don't want to taste any of it. And I don't want to scream any more.

I don't want to do this, but at the same time, I do. My head hurts more than ever, more than anything else in my body. I can't focus on one thing anymore, but I try to. The stinging sensation jars my discipline. My head feels like its about to explode.

Which it is.

I have no way of proving whether the flower is or isn't real, but I know that I see it. Earlier I tried to ignore it, instead focusing on my rifle...

_This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine…_

But now I want to focus on it. All the pain in my body seems to be coming from my head now. Right down in my brain. All the pain in my body is coming from my brain.

I try to collect my thoughts.

_My rifle is my best friend. It is my life…_

I don't want to think about my rifle—

_There are many like it, but this one is mine…_

Or my missing legs, or anything else. I don't want to think about the men manning the machine gun I can still see in the corner of my eye, or the smoke in the sky, or the blood on the pavement. Even if it belongs to me.

I want to think about the flower. All I want to think about is that pretty flower.

_This is my flower. There are many like it, but this one is mine…_

As I draw my pistol, I want to think about my pretty flower.

_It is my life…_

As I raise my pistol to where the pain is coming from, it is all I want to think about. It _is _all I think about.

_I must master it as I must master my life…_

Look at the pretty flower.

_Look at the pretty flower. _


End file.
